Il fiume del terrore

I am so glad to have caught a little thriller - more than horror - film from Estonia. So glad. OK, it brings nothing to this found footage flick; when you have seen CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST or BLAIRWITCH... and many other rip-offs, you can't get surprised, but you still can be excited, entertained. Plus it is a survival that will make any movie buff think about John Boorman's DELIVERANCE. And, again, many other horror films were the same. I am thru with American horror films, they are more or less all the same, predictable at the most, unlike the European ones, for instance. So, yes, this one is really worth watching if you crave for this kind of film. And remember, you have here more a thriller than a true horror yarn.

I really liked the different approach this film took. When filming for a vegetarian sausage ad, members of the group wander into the forest. You get gaps, you don't know what happened at first. There's confusion and tension as you the viewer don't know what happened, or what is going on either.

The local guide is trying to find them and figure out what happened. You get snips of "found footage" but most of the film isn't in this style. The pacing in the 2nd half of the film isn't perfect, but overall I thought it was a really solid horror film. I really enjoyed it.

The location and cinematography is absolutely gorgeous too.

It is set in a forested river area that doesn't show up in many International films. Andrejs is a wilderness guide, and his job is to guide a small group of people who are intending to film for a commercial on a vegetarian sausage. For them the trip is a lark, and they have little interest in safety or the dangers and soon they disappear. However Andrejs is serious about his job, and he tries to find out what happened. And it seems the forest has other ideas. And in this movie the forest really is the star. But it really comes down to whether the viewer cares as much as Andrejs does. There is a strange flower growing in the forest, which may explain some of what is happening.

A bunch of young people go into a forest/river area, to film an adventure video with a vegan sausage somehow shoehorned into it. Everybody communicates as if it was their first time among other people. There's some mysterious flower blooming in the forest, that seemingly makes these people even weirder, a nut of a "sheriff" who tells you, that you can't urinate in "his" forest..so apparently the answer to a lifelong question "does the bear $h1t in the woods" - is a "No!", at least in this particular location. Who knew. There's another bunch of strange individuals, conducting some sort of iffy business and some other, cabbage fermenting gentleman and his wife. Two people wear a nose clip of some sort, but nobody else...there's not one normal person in the whole film. The film is a salad of random ideas - inserted - again, at random - minor characters, their stories and dialogues, shots, that add absolutely nothing.

There seems to be this trend, of making movies, especially "horror" movies, without any real conclusion, or even if it has some sort of ending, they don't show you, how it got there.

It's not as cute, as they think it is. Quite the opposite.

Imagine watching Star Wars where there would be no spaceships, no lightsabers etc shown. They would tell you - "yeah, so we travel between galaxies and stuff and we fight, but we won't show you how. Just imagine it, or whatever - and do our work for us - in your mind, it's cheaper that way and we don't have any ideas anyway."

Yeah, it wouldn't work very well, would it?

Almost everything would be half passable, meh acting, but it's low budget, so you expect that, even the non-ending would hurt way less, if it wasn't for the unbearable dialogues!

The fact, that non English speakers (maybe the actual actors themselves) dubbed the dialogues into "English", is totally fine, it kind of adds to the character. However, should you really write dialogues in a foreign language just using Google translate? Without having ANY native speaker to at least read through the script, before doing the voice-over.. Because that's exactly how the dialogues sounded. Maybe in Latvian, or whatever the original language was, it all sounded right, but in English it just didn't.

Don't get me wrong - all the words used in the film do exist, I've heard them all before, but never in this order. You know what they're trying to say, probably most of the time, but it's clear, that they've picked the wrong words and made up their own expressions.

I will put it this way - if you watched this movie on mute and without any subtitles, just for the visual, you'd probably get way more out of it. You'd try to imagine, why people act the way they do, you'd try to figure out what they're talking about - and you'd do a much better job, than the filmmakers did.

This movie made no sense. I watched the whole thing and couldn't understand what was going on 95% of the time and it's just a horrible movie overall. I don't know what the plot was because it really didn't give a plot. The ending was just bizarre. The whole mystic River thing was just crazy, weird and the cabbage part was kind of odd as well. The ending itself made no sense because it was just the main character. Pretty much having a panic attack the whole time and the other party members were fine. It just made no sense at all as to what the movie was about and it. It's just a confusing mess is what it is.